Why you need a One Page Strategy.

Having a clear strategy is the key to driving business growth. One of the best tools to map out your company’s strategic direction is the One Page Strategy. Learn how to create your own One Page Strategy and unlock greater results for your business.

If you are anything like my clients, you probably already have some kind of detailed business plan. You might even be sticking to it. But a long and complicated business plan isn’t practical for a fast-growing company and it won’t be a helpful tool for you or your team on a day-to-day basis.

You need something that gives you that quick, big picture view. You need a One Page Strategy – it provides you with a helicopter view on a single page, one that you can fold up and put in your notebook or stick on your wall to remind you what your goals are and how to get there.

The Power of Simplicity

Many organisations underestimate the enormous power of simplicity. Don’t fall into the same trap. The One Page Strategy may be a simple tool but it’s a powerful one – it provides you and your team with a concise plan you can refer back to again and again, a map of your goals, plans and priorities.

By getting everything down on a single page, the One Page Strategy not only gives you a visual reminder of where you’re going, it also forces you to boil down your business to its simplest form and align each piece of your plan with one another.

Creating your One Page Strategy

The One Page Strategy includes these core elements:

1. Annual Goals & Key Initiatives – what you want to achieve?

2. Quarterly Actions & Priorities – how you’re going to achieve it?

3. Accountability – who will do the work and by when?

4. KPIs – how will you measure success?

To help your organisation create your own One Page Strategy, I’ve created a template you can download (click file > make a copy or download to access it). As you work through the template, remember what matters most is getting the strategy right – how you phrase things or what the final document looks like isn’t important. The key is to ensure you and your team know what the goals are and how you’re going to hit them.

Understanding the Template

It starts with your annual goals – these tend to be financial metrics (e.g. revenue, profit, margin) but your business may have other numbers that you’re already tracking and that you want your team to strive for (e.g. net promoter score). These annual goals then get broken down by quarter.

We then move onto your key initiatives for the year. These are the most important 3-5 key initiatives for this year to ensure you reach your annual goals. It’s important not to come up with more than 5 initiatives for the year – otherwise you and your team will become overwhelmed and lose focus.

For each quarter, we set company priorities. These make your goals concrete. If you don’t accomplish them this quarter, you might never hit your annual goals. E.g. If you need to accomplish a certain big task next quarter that requires a new hire then hiring that one employee could be one of your company priorities. This section is where I recommend you and your team spend the most time when doing strategic planning - you want to be clear and aligned on what the priorities are and what needs to be done to make them happen.

The accountability section takes the company goals and priorities and then breaks them down for each member of the management team (i.e. what are my KPIs and what are my priorities to ensure the company KPIs and priorities are achieved).

At the bottom of the One Page Strategy, we have critical numbers - these are the leading KPIs that show whether you’re on or off-track. These are different from your goals because those numbers will be lagging KPIs (i.e. it's not until you hit your revenue goal that you know whether you're on or off-track). We want numbers that inform you in advance whether your business will hit its revenue target (an example for a service-based business might the number of consultation calls made). You'll see there are two types of critical numbers in the template, people / balance sheet and process / profit & loss; this is because we want to have a holistic view of your business across all areas to avoid misleading metrics (e.g. sales increase but customer satisfaction decreases).

Using your One Page Strategy

Once you have your one page strategy in place, it should form the basis of your weekly management meetings. Are you on track? There's no need to spend time discussing ones where you're "on track", you want to review the ones that need attention and make a plan of action to get back on track.

The One Page Strategy is a valuable tool to develop and deliver a powerful strategy that drives business growth today and in the future. Maybe you don’t need that 15-page business plan after all?

PSST…

If you’re looking for support to drive sustainable business growth and want to accelerate your company’s performance like my clients have this year (34.9% increase in revenue, 22% increase in profits), then get in touch to book a no-obligation call to discuss working together.